Rage Against the Dying

Thirty-three





I stopped in the bathroom off the emergency room lobby to wash the blood off my hands and got a ride back to my car at the courthouse. Driving back up to Catalina I wondered what it would be like if I could talk about all this with Carlo. Forty-five minutes later I pulled into the garage and went into the house to get slammed anew.

I barely noticed that Carlo was not his usual serene self. Shoving the Pugs away with my foot, with a quick hi to him where he sat at his desk, not noticing he had his head in his hands and even if he did whether it was because he couldn’t get his checkbook balanced, I went into the bedroom to change my clothes before he saw Zach’s blood on them.

Jane’s satin bedspread was tossed onto the reading chair in the corner of the bedroom and the bed was stripped.

The bed was stripped and the sheets were nowhere to be seen.

The bedding must be in the laundry room.

Without trying to appear normal I ran from the bedroom to the laundry room, where I saw the bedding in a heap on the floor. I opened the washing machine and saw the clothes that I had been wearing and forgotten about the day I killed Peasil. They weren’t smashed against the sides of the basin the way you usually see clothes after the spin cycle; they had been moved. They had been examined.

I was aware of Carlo standing behind me, not touching me.

I wanted to tell him everything, starting from, oh, about thirty years before and ending with the suicide of my rookie’s father, but instead, “You don’t do laundry,” I said stupidly, looking at a still-pale-burgundy-colored patch that the bleach had failed to remove from the denim blouse.

His voice sounded aggrieved. “I was trying to help out,” he said. “You haven’t seemed yourself after your … fall.”

I turned around and faced him, no longer thinking of the fresh blood on my blouse. Compared with what he knew now, it was trivial. Carlo didn’t seem to notice the blood. I wanted to lift my hand to touch his face in comfort or supplication, but I had drained out of myself and couldn’t take the chance of trying to touch him. I didn’t have to ask what he knew. He was very helpful and gestured toward the washing machine.

“I was going to put them in the dryer, but they were already dry after so many days. And then there were. Stains. I don’t know if you’ll get the stains out.”

He was saying these little mundane things, but his eyes were begging me for something else, something much bigger, like an explanation that would erase what he was thinking.

“He,” I began, perhaps intending to explain how I had been assaulted and killed the horrible man in self-defense. But something told me none of that mattered. What mattered is that I had killed a man and hidden it from Carlo and I couldn’t deny that looked bad.

I turned back and opened the door of a cabinet and pulled out the box of garbage bags we keep there. I took one and collected the clothes out of the washing machine, including the hat, gloves, and shoes, and crammed them into the bag. I turned the washing machine back on, poured some bleach in to get out any remaining residue of Peasil, and shut the lid. Then I took the garbage bag into the bedroom, where I added a couple pairs of jeans, half a dozen T-shirts, and everything in my underwear drawer. Very methodical, I opened the drawer in my nightstand where I keep my prescriptions, took the bottle of Tylenol in which I hid my sleeping pills. Carlo didn’t follow me into the bedroom. I didn’t expect him to.

I came back out and grabbed my car keys and my tote bag, making this as fast as I could for both our sakes. He was collapsed in the recliner where he usually reads, still begging me for something I couldn’t give, a woman I couldn’t be.

“Please. Tell me,” he said.

“You know what?” I said, as harshly as I could while my heart got another painful little crick that took some of the harshness out by making me gasp at the same time I spoke. “This isn’t working out for me.”

I turned away despite the pitiful sound of his whisper that may have been “please don’t leave.”

And I left. I left.